


Saturn VI

by WithoutAQualmOfConscience



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Alternate Universe - Space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-28
Updated: 2013-07-28
Packaged: 2017-12-21 15:32:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/901921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WithoutAQualmOfConscience/pseuds/WithoutAQualmOfConscience
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Recon Corps comes from somewhere else, Armin imagines space to be something like the sea, the 104th Trainee Squad dreams divergent dreams as a collective, and Mikasa does not have the programming to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saturn VI

**i- Collective (104th Trainee Squad: I)**

 

 This is Us.

 

 From Southern hunting villages, from homes long destroyed, from inside The Wall and formerly from out. We are a mess of small, scared bodies prepared to be bruised and cracked and bloodied though we do not wish it upon us and we try to pretend we aren’t frightened, that we don’t wish we were invincible, that we don’t hold our breath at the thought of skeletons looming above us.

 

 We ache for meat. For bread. For an end to the exhaustion. For an end to the looming terror that we see in the corner of our eyes reaching its hands over The Walls, smiling at us with a mouth that has devoured our mother.

 

 One of us is sleeping with her eyes open and the other is wishing, some nights, that he could pull his out. That he could have pulled them out five years ago. That he could have pulled himself out of skin. Sometimes he is aware of his sinews and intestines and his beating heart, constant, terrifyingly loud in the darkness. One of us does not even have a heart beat. One of us sleeps and dreams of slaughter. One of us sleeps and dreams about another of us touching him, kissing him, sliding cool hands over a warm body. One of us sleeps without dreaming. One of us is not asleep and wonders if he will ever really be and outside, there are stars beyond the wall.

 

**ii- MIKASA and Similar Units**

 

 1. Mikasa does not have the programing to die. There is no self-destruct function in her creation, no comprehension of immobility, no time to process that she is not processing her own movement as she leaps away from the crashing weight of the gigantic creatures that her sensors consistently register as “humanoid" but nothing more.

 

 2. It was safer to have a decoy child, with the family so high at risk for being trafficked out. They had “highly desirable features." A not-child, an substitute, was expendable, was supposed to keep the family safe.

 

 3. Marco sometimes looks at her with what is classically described as “knowing eyes" that in a year or two will be nothing but broken glass laying in half a face with wires sputtering wildly about what remains of his head and she will not mourn him because he will not die in vain and, despite the laws against robotic revitalization, he will not really die.

 

 4. “We should dissect her, too!" somebody in the court shouts, and she sits perfectly still because this is not the first time anybody has ever wanted to see her insides and she is no longer capable of running the program for fear at a threat like this.

 

 5. The kidnappers didn’t know the difference. Her skin felt so real. But her bones are metal and the blood covering her face when she appeared with Eren in front of Dr. Jaeger was not hers and could never be hers.

 

 6. She wonders, sometimes, how it would be to be swallowed. If she would break the way the others do.

  

 

**iii- Oh The Shark Has Pretty Teeth, Dear (Rivaille)**

 

 They are still laughing on Mars about how Rivaille dropped out of the smuggling ring to go cut up aliens outside of Saturn. What a dope. What a geek. But there is silence when somebody asks, “Well, have you ever seen one? A Titan, I mean?" and nobody has an answer. Someone volunteers that once on Neptune they heard about a guy who got eaten by a swarm of ants, or something like ants. But it can’t be confirmed. Not the way that the bodies shipped out to the stations outside of Jupiter can be.

 

 The ones who knew him best are hardly even giggling, though. The ones who have seen him with knives in his hands are not at all surprised that he has gone to wield swords, to make clean kills of the staggering monsters that serve as bedtime horror stories to misbehaving children. Rivaille was always meant for greater things. At least, that’s what they say. What corpses lost in space pay testament to.

  

**iv- Graduation (104th Trainee Squad: II)**

 

of course we are proud of course we are glad of course we are grateful of course. we are adjusting our uniforms and preparing ourselves for our new separate duties and we are excited to be in the military police, no, no we are more excited to be in the survey corps, no, no, we are very pleased to serve on the guard. we are not we we need to stop this.

 

 

**v- Iris reticulata (Armin)**

 

There is something particularly comforting about existing in this moment. About the dust settling around your legs as you kneel under the enormous shadow of the skeleton, of what may be your friend. When you were little, you dreamed of stealing aboard a smuggler’s vessel, of leaving  for the blackness above you that looked so much like the sea. You imagined you would be secure, wrapped in the thrill of something new and dark and soft.

 

 It is hard, sometimes, to be a soldier for the people who organized the mass killing of the starving, the murder of your parents, the execution of the unfortunate. But you don’t say this. It is a small complaint in the face of how kind your comrades and commanders have been.

 

 There was doubt as to your ability in the beginning but you are as accustom to death as anybody. Hesitantly, your fingers scrape past the flowers in full bloom that peek through the rubble and you touch the warm, sticky, strangely familiar ribs of the Titan.

 

  

**vi- Hollow Corpses, Empty Test Tubes (Hanji)**

 “You’re a bit of a monster yourself," Levi says, not looking up from his paper, his dark-polished boots resting on the table.

 

 "But they’re not monsters, you see?" Hanji asks, making their way to their companion and smiling hugely, a smile so wide that Levi used to worry it would split their face.

 

 "No."

 

 Hanji kisses the top of Levi’s head and laughs and doesn’t expect him to understand, because nobody understands. Nobody on Earth understood, either. Hanji, you’re going to give up a federal position to go… kill aliens? It was a mystery, a joke, a suicide threat.

 

 But none of their coworkers knew how, when the footage came in (labeled: scientifically curious, humanoid, Saturn IV) and the grainy images of broken bones and bile poured over the television screen, Hanji felt a longing so deep in their stomach it rang in their ears. They hadn’t spent years of their life in school and subsequently on starships, remote colonies, and labs for nothing. All there was in the world was the pursuit.

 

 "You’re crazy," Levi says quietly, reaching up to brush the side of their face.

 

 "I just love my job."

 

  **vii- Work Ethic (Central Government)**

 

Occasionally there is mention in the United Coalition of Colonies about Titan. It tends to be followed by “Why don’t you just accept help?" or “Your sovereignty only extends so far, you know." But the threats are empty. There has yet to be a transport shuttle appearing in the thick clouds. There have yet to be UCC peacekeepers in masks with their disintegration guns prepared to take on the local fauna. There has yet to be anything but what there is and that is how it is.

 

   


**viii- 45,000 Hz (Irwin)**

 

It’s true he’s very handsome, like they say, and it’s also true that he has never lost a moment of sleep over anyone who has died on his watch. _When I was living on Mars as a boy, I had a dog._ He once told Hanji. _It was run over, but it had been a good dog and it did it’s job, so I wasn’t sorry._ He had smiled when telling the story, stirred his tea and looked out of the small windows of the cabin they were hiding in, waiting for the sound of footsteps to return. _I don’t see why people should be any different._

 

 

**ix- After the Battle for Trost (104th Trainee Squad: III)**

 We are alive. Most of us. We are reaching for the stars at night with hands that won’t stop shaking. We are raising our eyes to the sun that is burning far away, so far away they said we’d never make it. We are breathing air they said shouldn’t exist, air they want to deny us. We are pressing forward and alive. So very alive that it frightens them, but it does not frighten THEM yet and so we are working, striving, lifting ourselves into the air, onto our walls, climbing into the manufactured blue against the staggering streaks of red.


End file.
